Nightfall

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Nightfall Page 39

by Moshe Ben-Or


  Yosi squeezed the trigger again, walking his fire onto the enemy vehicle, trying desperately to outrace that swinging turret. A prison truck exploded into flame just left of the target, and then he was dead-on.

  The Zin commander’s body was suddenly engulfed in a sheet of brilliant blue lightning, the telltale signature of a fusion coil failure.

  Somewhere within the guts of the dead machine, the escaping plasma achieved criticality in a spectacular freak accident. A massive explosion ripped the turret right off the vehicle, flipping it a good sixty meters up into the air like a papier-mâché toy. A picture-perfect smoke ring rose upward through the gaping hole at the top of the hull.

  It wasn’t the exploding mine that fully woke him up. It was the idiot driver slamming on the brakes.

  The trail crate exploded before he even had a chance to figure out what was going on. The lieutenant had had time to yell something into the radio, and then his crate was gone too. And for the first time in twenty-five years, staff sergeant Kharrbass actually felt alive.

  “DRIVER CONTROL!” he yelled as he grabbed the commander’s stick.

  He was a sitting duck here, and the damned vehicle AI was a better driver than that imbecile Makhmad down in the driver’s hole…

  …The fourth IFV lurched diagonally forward and up the hill to its left in a swift hooking motion that pushed the vehicle to the edge of rollover but almost instantly got it out of Yosi’s immediate field of fire. Pivoting about halfway up the slope in a ninety-degree skid-turn that would do a dune buggy proud, the metal monster came careening back downhill, crashing its way through the roadside pileup with the ease of a toddler kicking aside a clutch of plastic toys.

  Whoever was driving that thing had his game face on…

  …”DISMOUNTS OUT! Out the top now!!!” roared Kharrbass as the crate smashed aside a wrecked cargo truck.

  “Khurrsayn, boot my bots, Allakh curse your balls! And get those poxed cowlings off!

  “GUNNER TARGET FRONT! Get that shaitan laser!”…

  …The IFV came roaring straight at Yosi, gravel flying, mud spraying in giant roostertails from under the tracks, autocannon swiveling onto the laser’s position as the driver effortlessly stabilized his skidding vehicle so the gunnery AI could aim better.

  The infantry it carried in the back were jumping out at full speed, going up out of the tied-down top hatches instead of waiting for the rear ramp to drop, bouncing off the ground and rolling for whatever cover they could find.

  Shin Takawa’s Znamensky opened up on them, barking in long bursts.

  A moment later, grenades began to explode where the enemy was going to ground.

  Yosi didn’t have an automatic grenade launcher. But he did have a well-muscled heavyworlder with a bag full of hand grenades and a love of the ancient Core Duchies sport of sling hunting.

  The infantry bots were booting up under their storage cowlings. Yosi could see the thin plastic bulge as the legs twitched and the turrets moved in the pre-start function check. Another few seconds, and they would be in play.

  An enemy soldier was leaning three quarters out of a hatch, trying not to fall off as he fumbled with the left-side cowling. In his rush to free his bots, the idiot had forgotten to stealth up. Not that it mattered all that much under the circumstances.

  The two pressure valves embedded in the laser’s cooling jacket popped open, belching clouds of steam and whistling like an ancient locomotive. Only moments remained before the lasing element would overheat and fail.

  The autocannon opened up just as Yosi yanked the pin on the back of the laser’s tripod and rolled out of the way, diagonally down the back slope.

  The laser slid down left of him, hopefully out of harm’s way.

  The top of the ridge erupted in fountains of dirt where the laser had just stood. Armor-piercing solid slugs shredded everything in their way as they peppered Yosi’s erstwhile position.

  Rocks, shrapnel and splinters from shattered trees bounced off Yoseph’s armor as he rolled, scrambling for a rocket.

  The AI, of course, would have expected an armored vehicle, up there among the shelleaves. And the gunner didn’t have the sense to override its choice of ammo. Baruch Hashem.

  A rocket flew out of the bushes to Yosi’s right. It went high and wide, flying harmlessly behind the vehicle.

  Almost simultaneously, another rocket came in from the left. The IFV’s point defense system swatted it out of the air in a puff of white smoke, but the active defense alarm cue must have startled the gunner.

  The autocannon stopped shooting, jerked back up to the right and then tried to swivel onto the source of the rocket…

  …Dammit, he had to do everything himself, raged Kharrbass. Worthless idiots.

  “DRIVER TAKE OVER! GUNNER CONTROL!” he yelled, switching modes on the commander’s control station.

  Makhmad squealed something unintelligible and slammed on the brakes.

  The IFV skidded all over the place.

  Kharrbass cursed as he swatted at the inactive directed energy weapon icon over on the left.

  He didn’t care about damned useless slow-ass rockets. It was that damned laser-armed vehicle that he cared about…

  …The IFV plunged into the creek. Muddy water sprayed in every direction under the impact of the hull.

  And then the ground erupted.

  When he had planned this ambush, Yosi had known full well that there was only one place where the enemy’s vehicle-mounted ground scan sensors would not find a chain of two-hundred-kilo charges made from ground fertilizer mixed with aluminum powder.

  The disturbed earth around the damned things would stand out like a sore thumb on dry ground, as would the charges themselves. But sealed in plastic containers buried in the muddy bottom and bank of a shallow creek, masquerading as just another bunch of rocks among the reeds, the bombs would blend right in. Sensors had limits.

  The first blast took out the entire rear half of the right track, sending road wheels flying and almost flipping the IFV over in the process. The hull edge sunk down into the creek and dug into the mud as the vehicle plowed forward, self-healing track morphing rapidly as the onboard AI worked to cope with the damage.

  There was a second blast.

  This time the IFV did flip over. Pieces of track, shreds of camo layer and blown-off road wheels raised tiny fountains of muddy water as they rained back down from the air.

  The carrier righted itself in less than a second, rolling with the blast wave like a judoka after a throw.

  You had to give credit to the AI, thought Yosi. The thing was quality work.

  A third bomb exploded.

  This one went off in contact with the wide, mud-walking belly track the AI had morphed out of the formerly v-shaped bottom of the vehicle in order to cope with the creek’s squishy bottom.

  Blue lightning raised up a cloud of steam as escaping plasma met cold water. Tufts of white smoke came puffing out of the hatches.

  “Fusion coil failure,” flashed through Yosi’s mind, “Inner hull breach. Game over.”

  And not a moment too soon. Mere centimeters had separated the struggling IFV from the edge of the creek. There were no more large IEDs between it and him.

  A rocket smashed into the right side of the turret just as someone started to climb out of the commander’s hatch. As the alien slumped back down into the dead vehicle, the left-side bot popped off its cowling and tried to stand up on the armor.

  Another one of Mirabelle’s rockets exploded right next to it, sending the bot stumbling off the armored carcass, dragging a damaged leg. This gave Yosi just enough time to aim a rocket of his own. The bot collapsed.

  A rocket smashed the right-side bot to bits as it struggled to escape its cowling. Patty was turning out to be a killer shot with those things.

  No more than five aliens had made it out of the last IFV. At least two of them were still alive, pinned down by Shin Takawa’s machinegun.

  Leo slung off three gre
nades in rapid succession, and the alien riflemen fell silent.

  Juho Jarvinen’s machinegun barked up at the front of the ambush, followed by a stutter of rifle fire and the ripping-canvass sound of Mirabelle’s submachinegun in burst mode.

  Another homemade rocket exploded.

  Shin Takawa’s gun opened up again, this time shooting to the right.

  Apparently someone had made it out of the lead IFV after all. Or maybe some of the human guards from the cargo trucks were still alive.

  There was a sharp pop. The gong-like after-ring hung in the air for a split-second, then faded away.

  Helena’s laser must have hit something made out of thin metal, like a truck body.

  Yup, some human guards were still alive. Helena wouldn’t shoot at a Zin infantryman. To that elephant gun of hers, modern body armor might as well be the walls of Castle Freeman.

  Yosi grabbed up his submachinegun and went to take a look.

  * 50 *

  X writhed in schadenfreude. Yet his was a private exultation, confined entirely within the bounds of a skull. No surprise visitor would notice anything out of the ordinary going on behind the ergonomically-tilted, privacy-screened executive data desk. No hidden device would detect a single thing amiss in his office.

  X was a master of counter-surveillance, both human and electronic. His small but exclusive organization included some of the planet’s most able technologists. All of his skills, and theirs, had gone into ensuring the privacy of this personal space, this secret spider’s layer set in the very heart of his enemies’ power, hidden in plain sight.

  Yet, steeled by a lifetime of shadowy struggle, X behaved instinctively as if surveillance existed in all places, at all times. And so, were one present, the casual observer or the hidden scanner would see nothing but a somber old bureaucrat, brusquely reading through his daily reports. The very paragon of imperturbable efficiency.

  For half a lifetime, even in his enemies’ official reports, he had been Stone Man. Even his heart beat at its usual pace, as tightly controlled as his face.

  A Zin mechanized platoon, annihilated in moments. Four IFVs and fifty-nine Zin soldiers gone in a flash, so fast that not a single meow had gone out over the radio.

  Government prison convoy, also gone. Six trucks destroyed, eleven policemen dead. Sixty-three dead prisoners left on the scene. Therefore, eighty-eight had escaped.

  Not a single piece of functional hardware left behind. Everything not destroyed had been carried away.

  The only report the convoy had managed to get off had only added to the confusion. An automated contact report, sent by a vehicular AI. Ambush by antitank mine and an armored vehicle, with infantry.

  Orbital footage was inconclusive. A destroyer had arrived overhead twenty-five minutes after the contact report and saw nothing but burning wreckage, bodies and cooling footprints.

  Not a peep was to be had from a single tracker. Not from the police AI systems in the human guards’ rifles; not from the personnel recovery beacons in the Zin armor. Nothing.

  It had taken four hours for a hastily-scrambled mech company to creep up to the ambush site, with two destroyers for cover overhead, mind you. And nada.

  A few booby traps set on approaches to the scene, and among the wreckage. All had been made with homemade explosives and parts out of commercial electronics. Half a dozen casualties when the Zin had stumbled into the first one.

  Lots more had been set deeper into the forest, where they couldn’t be easily found by scanners. With three bots destroyed and eight more Zin casualties within the first hundred meters of the tree line’s edge, following the ambushers into the woods had turned out to be a non-starter.

  The next morning, a scattering of passive RFID tags from the missing police rifles had turned up in a clearing about two kilometers away. Some expert had used a vibro to cut them out of the weapons, with a precision bordering upon the surgical. Then he’d set them out as bait for a series of traps as clever as they were vicious.

  The clearing of death had killed two Zin soldiers, wounded seven more, wrecked two helicopters and forced a whole infantry platoon to cower in motionless terror for twelve hours while EOD technicians worked to extract it, man by man.

  In response to this series of humiliations, the affected Zin brigade commander had demanded permission to send his whole unit into Chungara District and beat brush until whoever had slaughtered his people was found and torn limb from limb.

  To this, Prince Khharrq had acidly responded that nearly half of Chungara District was part of Paso Chungara National Park. In turn the park, south of the snow line and west of the pass, consisted of some two hundred and thirty thousand square kilometers of trackless alpine wilderness, nearly half of which lay above the toxic line. The humiliated colonel’s enemy had complete freedom of movement within that space, and in that terrain it would take not a brigade, but an entire army group to deprive him of said freedom of movement.

  His Highness also wanted to know who would secure the pass, not to mention Highway One and the southern outskirts of San Angelo, while all of the colonel’s soldiers were busy stumbling into traps and getting lost in the toxic wilderness.

  While he was at it, would the colonel explain why most of the destroyed platoon’s robots had been found wrecked under storage cowlings? Would he explain why his helicopters had stupidly tried to land in the middle of a minefield?

  What the hell were the colonel’s soldiers doing that far north, anyway?

  The brigade’s mission was to secure the highway and facilitate the establishment of native forces in its districts, not to gallivant about on dirt trails in restricted terrain above the toxic line, or to push isolated platoon-sized outposts out into the middle of nowhere!

  Forensic analysis of the scene showed that, with the exception of a handful of small arms and a few hand grenades, all the weapons used in the ambush were primitive and improvised. The total number of attackers involved did not exceed twenty.

  Nobody was sending any brigades anywhere. His Highness had more important things to do than to send thousands of troops on a wild goose chase. There were huge, strategic cities to occupy and densely populated districts to establish order in.

  The colonel needed to stop fantasizing, tighten up discipline, and do his damned job. If the colonel could not do this, then His Highness was going to find someone else who could.

  And that’s where things stood, thought X. Almost within walking distance of the new planetary capital, a bunch of rebels with laser cannon were running around at will, and the Zin simply didn’t have the manpower to stop them.

  No way would Sanchez’s tame media mention any of this. He’d had to piece it out of statistics and stolen Zin reports himself. He doubted anyone else in the human government even knew all the details.

  Radio Free Paradise would have to get hold of the story somehow. It wouldn’t be easy to give it to them without exposing himself. Or to find them, for that matter. All he knew was that they had to be Poly students. Probably friends of Carmen Denero’s, from the way they talked about her “martyrdom.”

  This could be it, he thought. The beginning of something big. He had to take the risk or he would never forgive himself.

  “Who is he?” thought X as he formulated his plan, “Who leads these men?”

  * 51 *

  The colonel’s epaulets with the row of three spindly, six-pointed stars still felt like a masquerade.

  They weren’t quite exactly the same as League rank insignia. He’d replaced the plain ring around each star with a laurel wreath and added two longitudinal stripes, to give the epaulets a more Paradisian-style look. So, technically, he wasn’t even impersonating a League officer, at least as far as any future court of law might be concerned. Not that any charges were likely to be brought, in view of the obvious extenuating circumstances.

  “This is my commander, Colonel Weismann, cavalier of the Silver Circle and Hero of Israel,” Patty had announced to the newly-liberated
prisoners the moment they’d been herded together on the far side of the ridge from which he’d staged that first ambush, “and this is his deputy, Captain Prince Freeman, of the League Shock Corps.

  “These men lead us in the battle against the alien invaders and their stooges.”

  Something like every tenth man on the planet had watched Leonidas Freeman face Shin’ichi Takawa at the Paradise Games. The Prince of Freestyle had posed for the team photograph in his Shock Corps uniform. The locals would have had to be blind and stupid not to have instantly recognized him, beard or no, even without Patty’s over-the-top introduction. Between that and the sheer shock of events, no one had had any thought of doubting Yosi’s credentials as a Shock Corps colonel.

  By the time Miri’s whispered translation had made it into his ear, it was too late to object. Patty was already swearing the lot of them in as members of the Free Paradise Army. The other two choices she’d given them, waiting for the Zin rescue party to show up or running off into the toxic woods on their own, didn’t find any takers.

  Whether she’d made up the oath in advance or improvised it on the spot, the thing was a true work of art. Even in Miri’s halting translation, pausing every other sentence to think of just the right Hebrew word, Yosi could feel the stark beauty and the desperate pathos of it. Mirabelle had choked up halfway through, and there was nary a dry eye to be seen among the new recruits by the time the swearing-in was done with.

  And it had just stuck. An old man among the captives had once been a buck sergeant in Palmer’s army. Another, middle-aged, had served in the Carabinieri. Before the day was out, those two had every single former prisoner snapping to and saluting whenever Yosi or Leo passed by.

  He supposed, thought Yosi, that whatever made the Paradisians feel like real soldiers and raised the authority of the officers was to be welcomed. But he still felt like he was stuck in some Purim farce gone horribly wrong.

  The fact was, that for all of his plentiful combat experience and all the exercises with the other Freeman retainers, he had never as much as commanded a squad in battle.

 

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